The Gridstore 2015 Infrastructure Expansion survey, conducted across the US and internationally among 720 global IT professionals, representing a cross section of verticals, asked the IT community a wide array of questions on their current infrastructure and expansion plans for 2015.

Victoria Grey, CMO, Gridstore, stated: "Just under 55 per cent of those IT professionals we surveyed claimed they were familiar with converged or hyper-converged systems, and of those who are aware, nearly a third of the sample stated that they were actively considering those systems as part of their infrastructure expansion plans for the forthcoming year."

"Top uses for those infrastructure projects that are actively being planned was insightful, with compute and storage refresh cited by 39 per cent of the sample, virtualization of standalone servers at 34 per cent and VDI at 26 per cent. The drive to the Cloud also appears to be continuing with over 35 per cent of the total sample claiming that their most important infrastructure program centers on private or hybrid cloud deployments."

Key points:

Of the 55% of IT professionals citing familiarity and understanding of the nuances and benefits of converged and hyper-converged systems, almost 30% are also planning an implementation in the next six months.

49% of respondents reported currently having a mixed hypervisor environment with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware being the leading choices (45% and 80% respectively) with Citrix XenServer and KVM following in adoption.

Reflecting VMware's dominant hypervisor position, 45% of respondents use vCenter as their management platform, but Microsoft is rapidly gaining ground with over 30% using System Center or Hyper-V management.

The number one IT expansion projects planned in 2015 are compute/storage infrastructure refresh, at 40%, with hyrbid or private cloud closely following at 37%.

"The survey results clearly support our strategic position as the leading provider of HyperConverged systems focused on the Microsoft ecosystem," continued Victoria Grey.

"Regardless of size of company or industry, leveraging the benefits of a hyperconverged infrastructure will prove highly beneficial to any IT organization, allowing them to reap the benefits of implementing flexible, easy-to-manage, and cost-effective systems that will provide dramatically increased performance and substantially reduced TCO."

Addressing the industry's shift toward adoption of converged and hyper-converged systems, Gridstore's HyperConverged Appliances (HCA) are purpose-built for the Microsoft Cloud-Inspired Data Center. The HCA brings together compute, SAN and storage into a single system that offers all-flash bare-metal performance, efficient scaling, and scale-to-fit design that eliminates costly compute sprawl. Customers achieve a 10X performance increase with 75% less infrastructure delivering 4X decrease in TCO. The Gridstore HyperConverged Appliance is an ideal platform for infrastructure refreshes and specific Windows workloads such as VDI, SQL Server\, Dev/Test, and ROBO.

About GridstoreGridstore™ is the leader in HyperConverged All-Flash Infrastructure for the Microsoft Cloud-Inspired Data Center. Our customers gain a 10X performance improvement over traditional storage as we put all-flash as close to the workload as possible. They realize 4X lower TCO by consolidation of three layers of infrastructure into one built on X86 hardware, and 10X less management effort due to less management points and less infrastructure to manage. Gridstore's HyperConverged Appliances (HCA) include both compute and storage in a single system with the flexibility for nodes being compute and storage or storage only and can scale from a minimum of three nodes to 256. Gridstore's patented software architecture delivers native Windows integration, per-VM I/O control, and elastic and independent scaling of resources. The Gridstore HCA is an ideal platform for infrastructure refreshes and specific Windows workloads such as VDI, SQL Server, Dev/Test and ROBO. Gridstore is headquartered in Mountain View, CA. and its products and services are available through a global network of value-added resellers.